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The Gulf region's leading men's luxury lifestyle magazine. For men who understand that the true value of luxury is its foundation in knowledge. Not so much a website, but an indispensable guide to life.

Subscribe to the magazine

The Gulf region's leading men's luxury lifestyle magazine. For men who understand that the true value of luxury is its foundation in knowledge. Not so much a website, but an indispensable guide to life.

Hackers can take control of your iPhone with just one text

For all you know, your Apple product may already be hacked. On July 18, Tyler Bohan, a researcher with Cisco Talos, a unit of Cisco that works on security, published a report enlisting the security flaws that are present in all versions of iOS and OS X except the latest one: 9.3.3 for iOS and El Capitan 10.11.6 for OS X.

According to Bohan, the security hole in Apple’s operating system can be manipulated through its default messaging, browsing and email applications. This essentially means that hackers can corrupt you phone’s memory and even get all your passwords by simply sending you an iMessage. All that’s standing in their way is the knowledge of your phone number.

To disrupt your phone, a hacker will first create a form of malware in TIFF format. A TIFF file is an image format like JPEG and GIF. The hacker can then send you that image via email or iMessage. Depending on your permission settings, the phone will simply render the image as normal while the image executes malicious code in the background. The sophisticated malware keeps you in the dark about the hack the whole time.

How do I avoid such an attack?

The best way to protect yourself is by updating your iPhone or Mac to the latest software. In case you can’t do so at this moment in time, turn off iMessage on your iPhone and disable MMS messaging.

Subscribe to the magazine

The Gulf region's leading men's luxury lifestyle magazine. For men who understand that the true value of luxury is its foundation in knowledge. Not so much a website, but an indispensable guide to life.